April 9, 2026 Here Come the Mummies The Kent Stage (Kent, OH)
By Rob McCune
An 8-piece funk rock band of Egyptian mummies is on a tour of concert halls in middle America, and if you’re unfamiliar with them, I promise you do not know what you’re in for at one of their shows.
Bringing, to borrow the voice of Vincent Price, “the funk of 40,000 years and grizzly ghouls from every tomb,” the Mummies have a groove that’s hard to beat. And pity “whosoever shall be found without the soul for getting down.”
Some bands need a gimmick. The Mummies have a hell of one, but as skilled musicians don’t need it. The octet plays guitar, bass, drums, keys, bari and tenor sax, tambourine, trumpet, and more. At some point on the stage there might be six saxophones – including one in each hand of two of the Mummies, being played simultaneously.
And damn, do they jam.
Seemingly every Mummy also has a singing voice that variously makes one wonder if they aren’t in fact the reanimated corpses of great American funk and soul singers like Sam Cooke and James Brown.
That’s one great thing about the Mummy gimmick: anonymity. We don’t really know who’s under all that wrapping. The band members have names like Mummy Cass, Eddie Mummy, K.W. TuT, Spaz, Fingerbang, Dr. Yo, Highlander, H-POD.
Midnight Mummy is the Flavor Flav of the group, eventually wearing a tall fur cap – like those worn by British soldiers standing guard outside Westminster Palace, but with a comically large eyeball in the center of it – and white-frame sunglasses as he raps and jives across the stage.
The show starts with a drum line down the center aisle, a procession led by two Anubi – plural for the ancient Egyptian god with the heads of jackals – and a storm of streamers.
And then, just as you feel like maybe that’s plenty to be surprised over, you start to pay attention to the songs and the lyrics, which feature the flavor of dirty puns and innuendo – and blatantly sexual themes – that men in their 40s now might have found on records hidden in the back of their dad’s closet and stayed up late to sneak a snickering listen.
The set list for this show at The Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio, featured songs with seemingly innocuous titles like “Pants,” but lyrics like “I’m coming in my pants, my shirt, it’s my best suit baby … I’m so excited, I hope that I don’t come too soon.” Yea, you know what they’re talking about. And as if they needed to drive the point home, the song ends with a cannon blast of white streamers into the audience.
You start to see the nice, older couples (who you might’ve spoken with before the show) in a different, shadier light. They’re wearing the merch. Some are really decked out, wearing Egyptian headdresses. They dance in the aisles and squeal in delight at the performance. And you wonder how many of them attended those swinging “key parties” in the Sixties (and maybe still do), and how many have spent some time in nudist camps.
But if you don’t get carried away by such thoughts, and instead let the funk take over, you might find yourself mummified by the night’s end. “And though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver, for no mere mortal can resist …”
Here Come the Mummies have booked tour stops through Illinois, Nebraska, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and even parts of Canada through late October.
Follow Rob McCune on Instagram (@Every_Thing_After_Photo) and listen to the “Every.Thing.After Podcast” on Spotify
